Responsible Supply Chain

From our materiality matrix, you can see that responsible supply chain is not currently seen as ‘material’ to the company. This is because this issue has not yet exceeded our materiality threshold, assessed based on stakeholder feedback and our Green Book analysis. However, several international news events this year have highlighted the complexity of global supply chains, and the risks this can bring in terms of impacts on the environment and wider society, poor labor practices and humans rights abuses. Hence we have included an overview of this issue in our 2013 reporting, as we believe stakeholder interest in this topic may continue to rise.

SGS’s supply chain includes global, regional and national sourcing and logistics. Our business lines have distinct and often specialized supply chains to meet customer needs, such as temperature-controlled transport and storage for the life sciences industry, or specialized movement of heavy freight for the oil & gas and automotive industries. We also make many small shipments of test samples, further adding to the complexity of our supply chain. In addition, with over 80,000 employees, our procurement of IT equipment such as laptops and mobile phones is considerable. Across our trend countries, representing over CHF 2 billion of spend, we have more than 50,000 suppliers, which gives us the opportunity to influence the sustainability performance of many companies at a local level.

The results of our materiality process in 2013 show that this issue has evolved and risen in priority for certain stakeholders. Accordingly, we will review and update our supply chain management approach in 2014.